Like attending a Rotary club meeting, reading Rotary magazines is an essential part of the shared experience of being a Rotarian. When you pick up a Rotary publication, whether it’s Rotary Down Under in Australia and New Zealand or The Rotary-No-Tomo in Japan, you’ll find that every single one does just what it’s meant to do: It informs, and it inspires. It keeps you up to date with Rotary news, brings you new ideas for your Rotary service, and tells stories that are relevant and meaningful to you. To me, these publications around the world are a tangible representation of Rotary’s greatest strength: that each club is a local, community-based entity, engaged in a truly global network.

This organization is incredibly large and diverse, and as much as we all have in common in Rotary, we are not a place where one size fits all. Our expectations of a magazine, both culturally and linguistically, are naturally going to be different. With our regional publications, Rotarians in Bulgaria can find out what’s going on in Rotary in Bulgaria, and what’s going on elsewhere in the Rotary world, along with the latest news from Evanston. Because each one of our Rotary publications belongs to the family of Rotary magazines – each one is, like every Rotary club, both fully local and fully part of our international identity.

One of the greatest privileges of being RI president is the ability to speak directly, every month, to every one of our 1.2 million Rotarians. It’s awe-inspiring to me, as I write this, to think of all of you, sitting down in your living rooms or at the breakfast table or maybe on the train to work, reading these words, and then turning the page to find out what’s new in Rotary. And overwhelmingly, that is exactly what each of you does. Not just because your Rotary magazine turns up in the mailbox, or because you feel you have to – but because Rotary magazines are good magazines. I hope that when you pick up your publication – whichever one you’re reading right now – you get the same feeling of pride, and ambition, that I do.

Rotary magazines remind us that as Rotarians, we are all part of something larger than ourselves. They show us just how much we can achieve through Rotary. Through them, we see what our Foundation dollars do, we see what our fellow Rotarians are doing, and we are inspired to Engage Rotary, Change Lives even more.